A UC Berkeley graduate who is a quadriplegic says in a federal discrimination lawsuit that he was denied reasonable accommodations for the law school entrance exam, including an electronic version of the test.

Joshua Davidson, 34, of Berkeley said he had instead been provided with a human attendant and received a lower score than he had hoped when he took the Law School Admission Test in October.

The lawsuit was filed this week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco against the Law School Admission Council, which administers the nationwide exam.

The suit seeks an immediate court order that would allow Davidson to take the test again in December with accommodations he said he had first requested in August.

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"They did not do what accommodations are supposed to do, which is to provide a level playing field that gives a person with a disability an equal chance to achieve," Lewis Bossing, a San Francisco attorney representing Davidson, said Friday.

But Brian Maschler, an attorney for the admission council, said Friday that Davidson had taken the October exam with "substantial accommodations" that were approved by his attorneys and "didn't like the result he got."

Davidson missed the Nov. 3 deadline to request accommodations for the December exam, said Maschler, adding the plaintiff had taken a "confrontational line" in the form of litigation to "take another bite at the apple."

Attorneys met Friday in an attempt to settle the suit.

Davidson is a quadriplegic who is mostly paralyzed below the neck as a result of a 1998 bicycle accident, Bossing said. Davidson, who uses a wheelchair, recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in anthropology. He had a 4.0 GPA and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Davidson cannot write or make marks using pens or a keyboard but instead operates voice-recognition software and a computer track ball.

In August, he asked the admission council for several accommodations, including permission to use a test booklet scanned into a PDF format using Adobe Acrobat software, a scribe to record answers on multiple-choice questions, extra time to complete the test -- ranging from double to triple the time -- and a separate testing area.

The council refused to allow Davidson to use Adobe Acrobat to manipulate an electronic version of the test and agreed to give him only 14 percent extra time on certain sections of the multi-part exam.

Using a scribe for other sections of the exam "does not permit Davidson to work independently and with uninterrupted focus," said the suit.

As an example, the complaint provided an example of a conversation with a scribe: "Please highlight the second sentence. (pause) No, not that sentence. The second sentence of the third paragraph, not the second paragraph."

"We don't think they gave him an individualized assessment that the law demands," Bossing said.

Maschler disagreed, saying, "We do examine each applicant on a case-by-case basis, but deadlines are important" because the admission council receives thousands of applications.